


The Adventures of Dino Barnes

by kayliemalinza



Series: The Brooklyn Buchanans [12]
Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-10-12
Updated: 2015-02-18
Packaged: 2018-07-29 02:07:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 4,906
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7666225
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kayliemalinza/pseuds/kayliemalinza
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff"><p>Originally <a href="http://kayliemalinza.tumblr.com/post/99787016251/buckys-dad-has-been-kind-of-a-blank-hole-thus-far">posted on Tumblr</a>.</p></blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Originally [posted on Tumblr](http://kayliemalinza.tumblr.com/post/99787016251/buckys-dad-has-been-kind-of-a-blank-hole-thus-far).

  
right so bucky's dad is dino barnes but he usually introduces himself like: how ya doing, i’m dino barnes, but you can call me dammit  
  
(as in DAMMIT, BARNES. he gets called that a lot. i’m not entirely sure all his ranking officers are even aware that’s not his actual name. of course, in less formal situations, he is referred to as DAMMIT, DINO. he even says that to himself, like when he drops a spoon or knocks shit over or walks into the doorjamb. one time he was having trouble, ah, seating himself while having sex with julia, and after half a minute of frustrating dicking around he muttered, _dammit, dino._ that made julia laugh so hard that dino had to sit there for ten minutes before she calmed down enough for another attempt.)  
  
but of course, “barnes” is as much a nickname as “dammit” is–anglicanization at ellis island and all that–and julia’s aware of this and she’s very interested, in the coy intellectual way that only someone with ancestors stretching back six generations on the same hundred square miles of soil can be: so the first night they meet, huddled over a splintery table in an ochre bar, she asks, “what’s your real name?”  
  
dino shrugs and says, “vegliantino di barnezzo.”  
  
“vegliantino,” julia repeats, every syllable accounted for and the stresses in the right place, which perks dino right up. she could’ve mangled the name and he would still be here, sure, but when a face like that comes with a mouth that doesn’t make you cringe–  
  
julia’s perked up, too, because she’s read the big hitters of italian literature, and–“you mean, like [orlando’s horse](en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veillantif)?”  
  
dino boggles for a second–idk how much reading he does but he’s certainly aware of the origins of his own name–and he’s about to compliment julia on being such a well-read young lady when she leans in real close and whispers,  
  
“ _does that mean i can ride you across the country, searching for adventure?_ ”  
  
you can imagine how the rest of that conversation went.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Originally [posted on Tumblr](http://kayliemalinza.tumblr.com/post/111358573626/okay-so-lets-talk-about-dino-barnes-and-his-four).

okay so let’s talk about dino barnes and his four million bastard children **  
**

(well

four

and there’s some hair-splitting as to whether or not they’re all bastards)

bastard #1:

dino barnes, aka vegliantino de barnezzo, was born in italy and fought in world war i and somehow ended up in brooklyn, new york in the middle of all that. considering the high casualties italy was suffering around and before the summer of 1916, it’s likely that dino deserted the italian army and made his way to the u.s. to join that army instead and hang around in bars not dying for a while.

there happens to be a german-jewish immigrant named hanne harel who’s also hanging out in bars not dying, but instead of doing odd jobs around town to get by, she’s doing odd men. hanne is the sourest sex worker in the five boroughs. her lip is always twisted and there’s an asterisk of [thin, red scars across her left cheek](en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dueling_scar). she can swear in five languages but she’s only fluent in german and yiddish and she’s got a bad head. don’t ask her if she came to america on her own. don’t ask her who she left behind.

given all these facts about hanne harel, and given the wealth of girls who speak dino’s language and reflect his charming smiles back at him and tilt their heads, quick and saucy, so that their hair falls over their shoulders, i don’t know why dino employed hanne’s services.

maybe he liked the language barrier just as much as she did. hanne hung out in the wrong bars on purpose and coughed up german and squinted her eyes when the men burbled italian back and she tapped her hands against their chests insistently, patted their pectorals and billfolds, dragged them upstairs by their belts.

maybe dino liked the brusque simplicity of a sure thing. maybe he got tired, sometimes, of bilingual flirting and the smug spryness of women who used his mother tongue like a plaything and thought she was the brightest star in his swarthy heavens and look how generous she is, picking him from the stable.

(“women.” well. [it’s mostly just the one](http://archiveofourown.org/works/7666225/chapters/17457070).) 

so dino employed hanne’s services from time to time, and years later there’s a brat running up and down the street just like he used to do, fickle-brained and twitchy like he used to be, with the same fat voice he used to have and the same mouth and chin and eyebrows, too.

hanne’s english has gotten better since 1916 but her manners haven’t. brooklyn and motherhood have scoured her down and her head’s gotten worse. the walls melt when she looks at them. people’s faces go screwy. she hears crowds of people buzzing incoherently in empty rooms.

dino’s head has gotten worse, too, loud like it was when he was a child, but not so bad yet that he can’t cover it up, can’t fall back on the same coping techniques that kept him from getting the belt too much. he has help, too.

during the same summer that he followed hanne harel up to her rented bed and pressed a couple of u.s. bills into the palm of her hand with a kiss to her knuckles that she didn’t appreciate, dino barnes met a dark-haired ingenue in the corner bar.

the ingenue came attached with a pushy sister and ideas about respectability and so before july ended, dino barnes was standing at an altar in his army formals exchanging vows with a woman who had a better excuse for throwing up that morning than he did.

dino and julia are basically compatible, though. they have fun and put their ducks in a row. dino pulls a paycheck and julia lords over a few tidy rooms all her own, setting throw pillows how she wants them and buying underwear in colors she likes and flashing her wedding ring at nosy landladies. she doesn’t have to crawl out the window anymore to go dancing. her sister rhoda stops clucking her tongue.

dino likes the rooms, the bright colors she puts together (bedspread and curtains and brassieres and all) and doesn’t mind the food much, either, although it’s better when she lets him handle the pots and pans instead.

julia doesn’t understand his headscape so much, doesn’t like how his words jump around and get loud and how everything she asks him to do passes like water through a sieve, how his anger happens all of a sudden and lasts for weeks at a time, but she does help. she remembers what he forgets and knows how to pin his ribbons right and carries the conversation at dinner parties when he’s gone off on mental sorties, thinking about how door handles work or a bowl of soup he ate when he was twelve. she shows off the baby on the shelf of her hip and rests her hand on the crook of dino’s arm and they make a lovely picture. very smart. a proper american family that’s doing everything right.

hanne, though. hanne and the defensive hitch of her shoulders and the stubborn thickness of her words

and the kid.

the kid is born five blocks away and three weeks before bucky is and meets dino face-to-kneecap on the street six years later. dino falls on his ass in the gutter and grabs the kid as he goes down, half to keep himself from falling (doesn’t work) and half to shake some sense into the little brat (definitely doesn’t work.) what mainly happens is that the top of their skull smacks up against his chin instead of the concrete, and both of them squall about that like dogs in a tussle. 

then dino pulls the kid in close as he stands up and sets them easy on their feet out of habit: kid’s the same size as bucky; sticky-out where he’s round (elbows, shoulders, wrists) and sinewed down the middle instead of pot-bellied, but still _bambino_.  

bambino’s speckled down the front with spaghetti sauce and speckled on the knees with cracked black scabs and the braid, loose-looped like an old sweater, is tied off with butcher’s twine. the end of it sits soggy in the gap where a couple of molars fell out early.

“watch it, mister,” the kid snarls.

hanne darts in, hisses “ _uschi_ , _no_ ,” and snatches her kid down the street before dino gets to answer.

he recognizes them, though; recognizes hanne’s cut-up sour lemon face and recognizes his own face from twenty years ago. he does a little reminiscing, a little math. has a little existential crisis. the idea of bastard children of his floating upon the winds of fate like dandelion fluff isn’t something entirely new to dino–he’s certainly considered the possibility, his lifestyle being what it was in his youth and thus far during his military career–but it never occurred to dino that he’d actually meet them, nor that the meeting would be accompanied by such a fulsome rush of recognition. it’s like something out of a gothic novel: secrets of the flesh, a disadvantaged wastrel, the fleeting moment of kismet before the villain intervenes.

this is what dino tells himself, at least, piecing together a narrative which will sufficiently intrigue and placate the woman he’s married to. 

it’s his last resort in case she doesn’t buy his other reasons for why he wants them to move. they’re comfortable where they are, the italian neighborhood where julia changed her mannerisms and speech to blend in (though not as well as she thought) but this place is better, he says. other army families live here, a school is nearby, you can walk to the shops and speak english as much as you want. i’ve advanced in rank and you’re making plenty of pocket money. we can afford someplace nicer now.

no need to tell her that this neighborhood is backed up against a different neighborhood, one full of sex workers and deserted wives and volk fresh off the boat who haven’t found bootstraps to pull themselves up by yet, haven’t finagled their way into the thriving merchant class that other jewish ghettoes are flush with. dino doesn’t mention that there’s an alley between the two neighborhoods with a fence plank that swings loose and that children wriggle through the gap all the time.

instead he says, isn’t this a cozy apartment? and look, there’s a boy next door for bucky to play with.

julia doesn’t ask questions, but she doesn’t close her eyes, either. she picks out curtains for the kitchen window and she puts a writing desk next to her vanity table and she sips her coffee on the front porch, watching her husband hold court over a swarm of children in the street. he always has a bag of candy in his pocket and he always makes sure the kid with their braid in their mouth gets the best piece.

the irish lady next door is outside scrubbing her windows. she’s not in the habit of closing her eyes, either. “it’s a good man who looks after his kin,” she says.

julia bites her tongue and stubs out her cigarette on the railing. _who asked you, sarah rogers._


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Originally [posted on Tumblr](http://kayliemalinza.tumblr.com/post/132767766351/continued-from-dinos-four-million-bastard).

so i need to tell you about the bastards number two through four, but they don’t show up for about another decade and in the meantime, the first bastard is pretty important.

uschi rachel harel is #1 in more than just birthdate, actually–she’s dino’s eldest and his favorite and most obvious mini-me

bucky’d have issues about the favoritism but lbh, julia monopolized him from the beginning and even if dino got to spend as much time with bucky as she did, they still wouldn’t click the same way. bucky’s a classic absent-minded professor, demeanor marked by long silences with desultory exclamations and a deep but inconsistent regard for his schoolwork. dino stares at him sometimes, not quite comprehending that bucky’s headscape is just a slightly different flavor than his own, that he and uschi can track bucky’s thoughts from point A to subsection Q because his brain skips around the same way theirs do, just a little slower and with less external narration.

bc bucky’s inattentive-type but dino and uschi are adhd as hell. not that anyone’s calling it that, yet–hanne calls her _vilde chaya_ and the neighbors say things like _loud_ and _trouble_ and _not again_ and the teachers at the school say _unacceptable. obstinate. lazy and stupid._

dino’s family didn’t say much; the village teacher beat him plenty but it’s a different matter to run distracted and hyper through crowds on a brooklyn street than it is to chase goats over six miles of mountain pasture. that isn’t to say that he didn’t trip over his own feet or engage the goats in stuttered conversation or collect beguiling rocks and bright, lush flowers only to lose them five minutes later–but there were no humans there to notice. 

it’s not like the goats can really judge a body for blurting out their stream of consciousness, anyway. (can dino di barnezzo imitate a yearling’s baa precisely? you bet your ass he can. he may have accidentally taught an infant bucky to do the same thing, before julia intervened.)

dino’s pretty good at handling kids, though, and quick on the draw when bucky gets his legs and goes pattering around the apartment. dino’s a master at nimble tackle dives and overhand swoops and any other method he needs to prevent bucky from knocking julia’s  ceramic figurines off the shelves or putting sharp things in his mouth. (so easy, dino says, he cannot even jump. why are you out of breath and complaining so much? he is a calm baby. my little cousins, they were much worse.)

dino even seems a little disappointed at bucky’s demeanor, which julia sniffs at (of _course_ her child is a little princeling) and then casually mentions years later with a distinct undertone of _should’ve been careful what you wished for._

because the harel kid, see–she’s not a toddler anymore but she’s exactly as wild as dino said his cousins used to be, and as sproingy and loud as any self-respecting goat. dino’s ecstatic.

even the neighbors notice (besides sarah being prim on the porch, i mean, because bucky and stevie attached at the hip after their first reluctant meeting–bucky literally clinging to his mama’s apron string, cutting her at the waist and weighing her down, dragging his feet when she tries to push him across the threshold _sweetpea please go play, mama needs some time alone_ –and then little stevie, propped up against a banister to get some sun after a week of sick, disgruntled about cod liver oil but still chipper enough to say hello to the one round eye peeking out from the neighbor lady’s pretty green skirt. and after that, sarah rogers and julia buchanan barnes bent towards each other like two garden posts lashed together by the same creeping vine.)

but back to the other neighbors and the kid–

idk if there are any dumbbell tenements in this area, specifically, with their interior spaces filled with refuse and piling up into a new land mass–but there is a trash pile somewhere, whether it’s at the end of the street or in the same alley with the loose-plank-cum-portal or a few blocks over, maybe at the edge of a dock. regardless: there is a trash pile, mountainous and glittering, full of sharp edges, scooped ledges and the baroque silhouettes of broken furniture.

dino gets accosted on the way home from the base one day–this neighbor, then that one, and afterwards the butcher from the row of shops one block over all come up to dino with a handshake and a warning: _saw your kid playing in the junk pile, pally._

well, that’s no good. dino’s not too familiar with the trash but he’s seen enough people walking in that direction with broken knives and splintered chair legs and an oddly brutal looking cheese grater to get nervous about his bambino, pale from new york fog and squishy from being coddled inside and read to all the time ( _let the boy run around, julia–what, so he can get hit by a car? i don’t think so._ ) dino fell down plenty in his childhood but that was on alpine grass and soft weathered wood and the yielding soil of goat pens. the occasional jagged cliff-face could batter a boy but it wouldn’t give him lockjaw. that cheese grater looked pretty damn rusty.

so dino quick-steps it back to the apartment and cuffs bucky’s ear as soon as he sees him at the kitchen table. “what the hell were you doing climbing on the junk pile?”

bucky retaliates with the inherited pout that pulled dino into marriage to begin with. “i wasn’t. i’ve been at school all day.”

“he _was_ at school, mr. barnes,” says steve, sourfaced and infallibly honest. dino’s never heard him fib about anything, not even the kind of sweet falsehoods that julia spreads around the neighborhood like sowing seeds in a field– _those gloves look darling on you; could i borrow a cup of flour?_ –so now the question is, who’s the doppelganger climbing on the trash pile?

“maybe it’s the girl on the other block who everyone seems to think is your child for some mysterious reason which i couldn’t possibly discern,” says julia, and takes a sip of tea.

dino clocks every corner of the room and shuffles his feet, brain locked up, hearing the far-off long-ago enemy’s bugle through the morning mist– _here they come, men! guns at the ready!_

steve and bucky suddenly become engrossed in their homework.

but julia isn’t a legion of krauts, and her affected woundedness is temporarily overcome with sympathic responsiblity ( _what if that were bucky_ ) so after a long moment she sighs and says, “that junk pile is dangerous; you really should go tell her not to climb it.”

because julia’s take on it is: you are morally obligated to care for your child. don’t make me an excuse to not do that. (and oh, how aunt rhoda would simper at that, _about time you got your head out of those silly tales and accepted your perfectly ordinary duty_ –unless she were preoccupied casting aspersions upon dino’s moral fibre, of course.)

“right now,” julia adds.

“oh,” says dino, and lights out the door and down the block to lure uschi off the trash pile with a peppermint stick, the way he used to lure goats away from ravines with a fistful of flowers.

that’s one of the good days.

there’s other days, days when uschi wakes up angry and hates the hiss of the radiator and the scratching of pencils in school and she hates the brush of her dress hem and her socks falling down and how people’s voices go _squawk squawk squawk_ and her own goes _crash crash crack_. after a hundred years she’s let loose to run home (left her books behind and won’t notice until later) but her mother’s not there.

hanne’s out working the way she usually is and uschi knew that, she knew that, she’s come home alone a hundred times before and fried up some food and played kings and queens with the bed sheets wrapped around her like a cape and been warm and full but here’s something she’s done a dozen times, too–she knew the tenement would be empty and locked she knew she needed her key always keep your key on you here’s a string to wear it around your neck or put in in your pocket don’t forget don’t forget this one thing this one little thing very important thing

and she forgot it.

so uschi’s locked out and she’s hungry and cold and frustrated and pissed at herself, pissed at her mother, pissed at the door. _she’s gonna plotz again_ some neighbor mutters as uschi stomps down the stairs and paces up and down her street then punches through the alley fence to the other street and paces there too and she’s still mad mad mad and now the houses are pissing her off and the grass in the sidewalk and the way people keep looking at her and now this asshole’s picked her up and thrown her over his shoulder _you fucking schmuck_

the asshole is dino, who was comfy in an armchair and halfway through a cup of coffee when the screaming started.

julia looked out the window at the spectacle in the middle of the street and said, “it’s that harel kid.”

dino went tense but hummed neutrally in response, staring at the paper.

“dino,” julia said. “go help her.”

dino gave julia a wide-eyed look then jumped up and out the door on a mission (because he knows that kid, he understands what she’s going through, he’s screamed in the middle of the road before and his parents beat the tar out of him and that was the best they knew how to do and he’s tempted to do it, too, but he’s not responsible for uschi all the time and he knows–he knows what the inside of her brain is like and he knows smacking her isn’t going to help–)

so dino stomps down there and when a few words just make the kid screech more, he simply  picks her up and flings her over his shoulder and hauls her down to her apartment.

she’s kicking and screaming, of course, and may’ve gotten a few good hits to his kidneys, but dino grew up hauling goats so he knows how to shift the kid until she’s hooked around his neck with her legs tamped down beneath one of his forearms and her wrists gripped in his other hand. not much he can do about the screaming in his ear, though.

so dino carries this whirling dervish all the way around the long end of both blocks (no way he’s getting through the hole in the fence like this) and it takes him two seconds, once they get to hanne’s place, for him to realize that it’s locked and uschi forgot her key

because of course she’d forget it. dino forgets his own key all the time; what he can’t understand is how other people _don’t_ forget things like that.

he has uschi down off his shoulders in a second, her heels going _thud-thud_ against the splintered wood and her fists _thwap-thwap_ against his chest as soon as her wrists are free–then dino’s restraining her again, crouched down to hold her legs between his knees and wrap his arms tight around her arms and waist and he’s saying _cara, cara, va bene_.

she cries, and goes limp with a headache, and he walks her back to the barnes residence where there’s a couch and a blanket and a mug of soup.

after that, there’s always a spare key at the barnes’ apartment, and a chair pulled out next to the boys for her to sit, and an extra cookie held out in mrs. barnes’ pale, beautiful hand.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Originally [posted on Tumblr](http://kayliemalinza.tumblr.com/post/132768310151/considering-whats-going-on-with-all-dinos-kids-i).

considering what’s going on with all dino’s kids i wonder if he ran into a shape-shifting goat lady while he was out in the mountains and she seduced him and he was so sweet about it she blessed his testicles **  
**

yeah this is a spirit/creature/supernatural being that’s been hanging out around his village for centuries, the patron saint of young goatherds. she watches over the children who herd and she watches over the goats. the children are taught to ask her for safety and prosperity. she can bless the goats with fertility (and she blesses the humans with that, too–when the children reach a certain age, when they are not quite children anymore, they’re told they can’t go up alone in the mountains anymore because the young women will come back pregnant.

skeptics say that’s because their boyfriends follow them up for the privacy and atmosphere, but other people know better. (if there’s ever a baby that comes out with horns or a tail or wiry fur down its back, the villagers know who to blame. cherish the baby, tho–love the little thing, and never shame its deformities, or the goatwitch will come down from the mountain to hurt you.))

the goatwitch shapeshifts. she can look like a goat (the most beautiful goat, passing among the others and confusing the goatherds, who know every one of their charges, and leading the goats into mischief or away from danger) or she can look like a child, variously boyish or girly, and play with the goatherds for an afternoon, curiously drink their watered wine, somehow neglect to tell them her name. in the right light, just for a flash, her pupils look rectangular.

the goatwitch protects the children and goats from falling off cliffs. that’s why [the goats can climb up nearly vertical surfaces](http://kayliemalinza.tumblr.com/post/111454985656/laughing-bc-the-crave-that-mineral-goats-are-from)–because the goatwitch is watching over them.

dino was also climbing, and he was in the throes of puberty and his limbs were recalcitrant and he’d always been clumsy anyway so yeah, he falls off a cliff

really should’ve died

but he’s a good boy, and he’s spent his whole childhood setting aside food for the goatwitch and praising the goatwitch in passing and he was so good with the goats, and spoke often and cheerfully, and he called on the goatwitch exactly as he had been taught to–some phrase that you say whenever you trip or fall while up in the mountains minding the goats (he teaches this phrase to uschi, years later, because she gambols around exactly as a goat does, climbing on the trash pile although she really shouldn’t, and falls a lot.)

so dino falls, and is all broken up, and cries out for the goatwitch, and she comes and puts him back together. in return for giving him life, she takes his virginity.

over a decade later julia asks dino how he lost his virginity, and he tells the story as truthfully as he remembers it, and julia is slightly annoyed that he’s telling a tale but on the other hand she is overwhelmingly charmed. what a sweet story, arousing to the mind as well as the cunt, and she falls a little in love with him. she asks for the story again and again and he tells it again, each time with the best detail he can, and she remarks on his consistency. “my stories change a little every time,” she says. “they become something new.”

“that’s because they’re stories,” he answers. “i’m telling you what actually happened.”

julia smiles and pats his cheek. just like uschi, dino tells the truth a lot more than people think.

but anyway–dino was about fifteen then, and a few short years later he has to go to war, and he knows it’s going to be bad and he might not come back. he’s a little fatalistic about it, actually–bucky gets that from him–so he says goodbye to his home as thoroughly as he can, and kisses every goat, and goes up into the mountain pastures to say goodbye to them, too.

the goatwitch is nearby, and hears everything he says to the goats and all the things he cries about and how he thinks he will die and never come home again. the goatwitch is upset about this–she may not show herself to him much anymore, but dino is still her favorite–so she decides that she will protect him through the war, so that he can survive it and come back home.

dino isn’t quite aware of this deal, although he is mysteriously filled with new hope, so he goes off to war, experiences horrors and always escapes death by a hair’s breadth. but he doesn’t come home. he deserts the army and knows he can be shot for desertion so he dare not return to his home village. he sends back a letter explaining he is going to america–he doesn’t want his mother to think he’s dead–but the thing is, the goatwitch has taken the image of him from when he was fifteen years old (she takes the image of many of her children, i think, and he was so handsome) so the people of the village spy their dino flitting around, and assume it is a ghost, and he died in battle.

when bucky falls from the train, he calls on the goatwitch (it’s the only option he has, it’s ingrained habit, he never tripped as much as dino or uschi did but he remembers them yelling out the blessing) and she comes. the goatwitch leans over him in the snow. she’s cranky, maybe, at being summoned, at the train tracks that have been carved into her mountains, at her favorite boy for never coming back. but she keeps the new handsome one alive long enough for someone else to come up and drag him away.

(she’s hungry, lonely and unworshiped, and the new handsome one has no bank with her, no payments held in waiting, so she takes his arm instead. a merciful price, really. it is crushed and painful and he has no virginity to give.)


End file.
